


Stone

by Valenix



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Kinda, M/M, Not Really Character Death, Temporary Amnesia, Weeping Angels - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-21
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-06 06:37:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14051103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valenix/pseuds/Valenix
Summary: “I promised,” Steve said. “I promise you, Tony, we will fix this. Strange said he’s close. Just… don’t forget, Tony.”His eyes flickered to Tony’s hand, hovering over his cheeks, ready to brush his tear away.“You know you can’t touch me, Tony. Remember? We can’t touch.”OR:That one where Tony becomes a weeping angel, and slowly starts to forget.





	1. Chapter 1

The angel didn’t know how long he had been in this place. He knew his name - Anthony - and he knew his mind was fast, and that it was somehow filled with knowledge he had no memory of gaining, but the Beginning was something he couldn’t recall.

It was peaceful here, quiet. He liked it, though something itched, between his shoulder blades, on the back of his neck, in the knuckles of his stone fingers; something was missing, he knew it, but he didn’t understand what, or how.

It was lonely. He didn’t know what lonely was, but this was loneliness, and he did not like it.

He had analysed this place a thousand times, and he did it again now; a strange field, filled with stones that read names Tony could remember with infinite clarity but couldn’t tie to any specific memory. Clean iron gates, and a cracked concrete road beyond; strange, sleek things hurtling down the road, tantalisingly mysterious and so ready to be taken _apart_ , so tempting, but so very far away.

Anthony had tried climbing over the fence, but hadn’t gotten very far. He knew he had to be careful, he knew that the eyes of humans were dangerous, he didn’t know exactly how they were, or why, but he knew to avoid them, and so the man who had appeared on the other side of the fence Anthony had been about to climb made him freeze.

The man was sad. He stepped closer, stared boldly into Anthony’s face, blond hair falling into eyes that kept Anthony pinned so helplessly, yet seemed to bring him back to life.

… Back? To life?

“You can’t leave, Tony,” the man said. “You know you can’t leave.”

Anthony said nothing. If he had a heart, if such a blessing was granted to him, he knew it would be racing. With fear, with happiness, with all the emotions he knew Humans had but could not recall ever having himself.

The man’s eyes were so sad, but they turned away. “Come on,” the man said. “Let’s get you back.”

Anthony could move again. He wanted to reach out to this man, to grasp his shoulder, sap the sadness from those eyes until nothing was left. But the man climbed the fence with practiced ease, and started walking, and Anthony only followed him, eyebrows creased into a frown.

The man led him back to the strange room Anthony called home. Anthony followed, soft and silent, marvelling at how the grass felt under his feet - as though suddenly, in this man’s presence, he became less stone and more flesh. The man sat down against the wall, let his head fall back against it with a thud. His eyes were closed, and Anthony knelt in front of him.

He examined the man’s face, trying to pinpoint what exactly drew him in, but all he saw was open honesty and a strange expression of _trust_ that Anthony didn’t know what to do with.

“Steve,” Anthony said. It sounded like the rumble of falling stones, of wind on an old brick building.

The man smiled, wide but sad, and nodded. His eyes were closed. “Tony.”

The strangest thing seemed to happen - something in Anthony’s stone chest fluttered, and his vision snapped clearer, and suddenly, in a rush, memories flooded in.

A man with golden horns, a fight in the sky, flying and falling, blue eyes reaching him too late, far too late, but just in time. For one last promise.

The man opened his eyes, little more than a low flutter, and Anthony - Tony? - found himself frozen once more. His hand hovered, still as stone, just inches from his face. Steve stared at him, tired eyes rimmed with red. His shoulders were rounded, and Tony wanted to make them strong again. He didn’t know how.

“I promised,” Steve said. “I promise you, Tony, we will fix this. Strange said he’s close. Just… don’t forget, Tony.”

His eyes flickered to Tony’s hand where hovering over his cheek, ready to brush his tear away.

“You know you can’t touch me, Tony. Remember? We can’t touch.”

Faintly, Tony remembered. There was something trapped in the ever growing stone tomb of his mind that was screaming, rebelling, trying so hard to break the walls down, but failing. He couldn’t touch Steve. There was a reason. He couldn’t touch Steve, because something very bad would happen.

Steve’s eyes fluttered shut. A sigh slipped past chapped lips. When he looked up again, Tony was already on the other side of the room, a sick feeling sitting low in the base of his belly, and wasn’t that odd? Normally he felt nothing.

“I want to touch you, Tony,” Steve said. His eyes pinned Tony to the wall and Tony couldn’t decide if it was a blessing or a curse. “I wanted to, so badly. I never told you because…”

Steve’s elbows were perched on the tops of his knees. His hands ran through his hair, and he sat like that, head bowed, a tear quietly landing in his lap.

“I just didn’t. And then you told me, you said you… when Loki, when you… you said you loved me.”

He looked up. Tony hadn’t moved an inch. Tony inwardly wondered why - Steve’s eyes hadn’t been on him, but somehow moving had still felt utterly impossible.

“Do you remember?”

Eyes fell shut. Steve was waiting for an answer, so Tony gave him one. “I’m sorry.”

The gravelly scrape of stone again, a shadow of a human voice. Steve’s face seemed older suddenly; haunted and scared.

“You remembered yesterday.”

He had met Steve before?

“Please, Tony, don’t forget.”

He couldn’t remember what he wasn’t meant to forget. He saw a flicker of Steve’s face, agonised, terrified; saw other faces too, ones he didn’t recognise, didn’t understand. He felt a sense of what it was to soar, to fall, to crash, to stare at the sky as it lit up with flames and know that it was the end.

If that was the end, what was this?

Steve stayed, for hours, and told him stories about people he didn’t know, had never met. Stories like how a robot had finally stopped making smoothies, which only worried people more; about a hawk who could no longer fly without a friend to lift him; of a spider who was spinning webs around the enemy, getting closer by the day. Of a god who had stopped laughing, and a man who was lately always tinged ever so slightly green.

The man nodded, needing sleep, and finally left.

“Promise, Tony,” he said, facing out of the room, watching the night sky outside. “I’ll come back tomorrow. Promise me you’ll remember me then?”

“I promise.” Tony said. The man left.

He didn’t know what else to say.


	2. Chapter 2

Anthony wasn’t sure where ‘here’ was, only that it was ‘here’, and there were other places, but this was where he needed to stay.

Something told him he had a home, somewhere else, somewhere very tall, but that made no sense; he could remember nothing before this place, this moment. He left the room, and found a field filled with strange stones that bore the names of strangers, and a forest of buildings on the horizon silhouetted by the early morning sun.

He could see a fence, and beyond it a row of machines. He itched to explore, but he didn’t.

He had to stay here.

He didn’t remember why.

A man came to visit him, and Anthony’s fingers itched to stroke his face.

“Do you remember?” the man asked, eyes closed.

“Remember what?”

The man’s face fell into despair for a moment. Then the man gathered himself again, opened his eyes, and started to pace back to the room. “Come back to the chapel, Tony,” he said, and he turned to walk back to the little room on the hill.

“We found your notes,” the man told him as they walked, and Anthony found himself vaguely puzzled that this stranger seemed to think he had ever written notes for anybody to find. “Strange thinks you might have been on to something, but we need you to remember where the artefact is.”

Blue eyes flickered toward him and Anthony froze. And then those eyes closed, and the stranger’s face was openly trusting, and Anthony didn’t know what to say.

So he said nothing.

“Please, Tony,” the man said. There were creases between his eyebrows now, and a downward turn to his lips. “Please, you have to know where we can find it.”

The odd thing is that Anthony could remember something; a wayward memory of a bright room with machines that made smoothies and a talking voice and axle grease on human hands that vaguely resembled his own. He remembered searching for information, and he remembered a moment of discovery and triumph, and he remembered an alarm and a rush to take to the skies.

And he remembered a place. A map. He remembered pictures of an object, one that he knew was important, but he lacked the words to describe it.

“I… remember,” he said, and was vaguely aware that his voice sounded wrong; like the wind whispering past stone buildings. “The artefact.”

The excitement and hope that washed over the stranger’s face were strangely intoxicating, and Anthony felt a fluttering in his empty chest. “But I don’t know… where” he finished, distracted by the tingling under his skin.

The man’s face fell. A long moment of silence stretched between them, while Tony stared at the strangers face and wondered why it was so familiar; why he so desperately wanted to reach out and caress it, why he felt a strange ache beneath his skin that he just knew would vanish if he could only touch the stranger’s face for a moment.

He didn’t know why he hadn’t done it already.

The man’s eyes opened. They were desperately sad, and scared, and there was a shadow of something else there that Anthony didn’t recognise. He sighed, and nodded, and promised he would find something, and when he left the world around Anthony became dimmer.

—

A man came to see him, just as Anthony was marvelling at the morning sun.

He had blue eyes, but Anthony could tell that they had recently been crying. He could see dark shadows under them, which spoke of a lack of sleep.

Anthony didn’t know what sleep was.

“Who am I, Tony?” the man asks, and Anthony says he doesn’t know.

The man just looked tired and resigned. “I’m Steve,” the man said.

Steve asked him about an artefact, and something in the back of Anthony’s head was screaming, reaching, desperate to get out. The man was waiting for an answer, a strange black object - a phone? - in his hand.

He could see the artefact in his mind. Exactly what it looked like, and the dilapidated place in the middle of the wilderness where it was housed. Some part of him could sense exactly where it was in relation to himself, though the journey to reach it would be long.

“I can… take you.” He told the man, oddly wanting to please him.

The man frowned, eyes closed shut, mouth downturned. “You can’t,” the man told him. “Strange said… He said it’s possible that you might stay this way if you leave. Forever.”

Anthony couldn’t respond. He was kneeling in front of the man, hand hovering over the man’s forehead, desperately wanting to gently tease the man’s fingers from where they were buried in blond hair.

“But I swear, Tony. I won’t let this take you. I- We won't let you stay like this.”

"I know," Anthony says, though he isn't entirely sure why.

The man swallowed thickly and let his head fall back against the wall with a thud; let the phone fall limply from his hands. His eyes were no longer clenched tight, but they looked tired and dark and sad, and Anthony wanted to run his thumbs over those eyelids and kiss away the bruises below them.

“The artefact,” the man whispered, and somehow the name ‘Steve’ floated into Anthony’s - Tony’s? - head. The man’s breath brushed over Tony’s lips, and he wondered what it was like to breathe. “You know where it is. Please. Describe it. Tell me where it is, or what it looks like, or how we can find it. Anything.”

Tony thought very hard, and a memory appeared, sharp and clear and somehow painful. He remembered a location, a place he had been to before, an object that he thought would solve everything, and it was that place that he thought of as he finally leant forward and brushed stone lips against soft ones. He let a hand caress the man’s neck; let a thumb brush along the man’s jaw; set a palm to rest under his ear, where it fit like it was meant to be there.

For a moment it was something like heaven. The man relaxed, sighed, and Anthony pulled back to look at him.

Then the man’s face twisted, and he gasped, and the colour drained from his cheeks, and wide blue eyes fixed on Anthony’s as the man screamed his name -

“TONY!”

\- And he was gone, nothing but a gentle breeze left beneath Anthony’s fingers.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I know the past two chapters were confusing - a side effect of me a) not planning ANY of this out and b) this being literally the first thing I've written for other eyes in years, so I went back to tweak them a bit and I hope they're more understandable now. 
> 
> I'll get better as I continue writing. Please have patience :)

Steve’s throat hurt when he talked, so he trailed off into a whisper when he asked Tony for just one more hint.

He didn’t hear any movement, and he pushed away the itching anxiety that crept up the back of his neck as a result. Tony normally _buzzed_ with energy, and to see him literally still as a statue until Steve’s eyes turned away was already unnatural. The fact that Steve had even stopped hearing his movement when his eyes were closed was unnerving. Terrifying.

The other victims did the same, before they became solid statues entirely. Before they crumbled to dust.

He knew Tony was unlikely to remember anything about the relic. He asked anyway, because he knew he couldn’t tell Tony how much he loved him, how desperately he wanted Tony back home, because yesterday the angel couldn’t even remember a life outside the graveyard. Yesterday Tony couldn’t remember Steve’s name, or his face, and every day he seemed surprised to learn that someone else _existed_ , let alone cared about him. The stone angel had a perpetual frown of confusion etched between his brows. Telling him he loved him would only confuse him more.

For a moment Steve imagined a brush of stone lips against his, and he sighed, leaned into the kiss, automatically releasing himself to it in a moment of weakness.

It took the brush of a hand across his jaw, settling on his neck, for Steve’s mind to catch up.

By the time he opened his eyes he could feel it - his _life_ flowing away, Tony’s hand pressed to his neck, the statue’s eyes staring at him in wonder and confusion and something that seemed to be love. Steve felt an emptiness inside him growing, threatening to swallow him whole, and he reached for Tony’s shoulders and screamed his name, trying to ground himself -

—

Steve woke to silence.

The sky above was overcast, but he could still see patches of blue through it. He latched onto that, stared desperately up at the sky, even as he felt his heart collapsing. For the second time, he’d lost everything. He let himself go numb, even as he sat up to press his hands to his eyes and block out the world a little longer. Then he looked up, wiped a tear of frustration away, and saw the relic on the altar only a few feet in front of him.

He froze.

There was no immediate way to know how far back in time Tony sent him. It could have been decades - it could have been centuries - but he was here, and he had the relic, and if he managed to get it back into the Avenger’s future possession then maybe he could still save Tony. Even if only from the distant past. He could work out what to do after - he would face this new life head on and move on - but he had a job to do, and he committed himself to it fully. He rolled to his feet and grabbed the relic, turned to survey his environment, and picked a direction.

Then he started to walk.

—

Anthony stared at the ground, at the place where the man - Steve? - had been sitting only moments before, and everything flooded back in. He was awake and aware and suddenly understood that he had been here for weeks, that Steve had visited him _every day_ , that he cried and begged and grieved when it became clear that Tony was getting worse. That the curse was making him slow down, making him forget, slowly robbing him not only of the movement that used to _vibrate_ out of Tony Stark, but the incredible mind that powered it. He remembered Steve reaching for his face, stopping just before his hands brushed stone, confessing to Tony how desperately he needed him back and whole and human.

And he remembered the curse. The first few victims; the moment they realised Loki was trying to copy a monster from a British TV show; remembered his search for the relic Strange had described that seemed capable of reversing the spell. Remembered diving in front of Steve to save him, taking the flash of light and the lethal blow, remembered crashing hard and almost bleeding out even before the spell could turn his flesh to stone.

He remembered why he couldn’t touch anyone - that if he did, they would be flung back through time and space.

He just threw Steve through time and space.

Tony could move, could think, for the first time in _weeks_ , and of course it was because he just consumed Steve’s future. He had been selfish, he had stolen Steve’s life, had ripped it from him all because he wanted a touch that Steve had warned him not to take.

Steve was gone.

Numbly, Tony wondered where he would be now - _when_ he would be now. Oh god, Steve had only just started to recover from his last awakening. To think that Tony had put him through it again-

It was Tony’s fault.

He felt emptiness consume him - more so, somehow, than before - and he finally comes to a decision; fighting the curse’s progress wasn’t worth it. It was never worth it, because _he_ was nothing, he was worthless, he was a burden to everyone he loved, and perhaps it was time he gave in.

He went to the front of the Chapel to stare out at the rush of traffic; there, he closed himself off, let the curse take over him, surrendered to the cold embrace of nothing, and finally went still.

—

The team visited the chapel. They found Steve’s phone where it had buzzed and beeped for the past few days, calls going unanswered until finally they realised something must be wrong and turned up in person to investigate. The team was worried, and they asked him questions, but Tony didn’t so much as blink when they close their eyes for his reply. He didn’t know if he _could_. It’d been three days, three entire days since Steve’s future was stolen from him, and he could feel the stone beginning to solidify around him. His mind was still aware - but it didn’t matter anymore.

“It can’t be too late,” Clint said, and Tony registers a flicker of anger and fear in his eyes before he pulls it back behind his mask. Bruce put a bracing hand on Clint’s shoulder and squeezed, staring down at the floor. “Strange can’t be wrong. Right? We were meant to have a couple more days!”

The others were silent, none of them looking at each other. Clint shrugged off Bruce’s hand and turned away, hands tugging through his hair.

They wouldn’t find the relic. Tony couldn’t even remember exactly what it was. He knew he knew before - he was thinking of it when he finally gave into reckless temptation, some strange glitch in the curse that was meant to conceal knowledge of it from him finally revealing it to him in that moment of distraction - but now it was gone from his mind again.

Distantly, he wondered why Steve never managed to leave a message in the past for the team to find.

He pushed the thought away.

—

Steve spotted a town in the distance and picked up pace, a sense of urgency driving him despite the echoing reminder in the back of his head that _this is the past, I have all the time in the world_. It seemed to be some kind of small city, bordering on the edge of cold stark wilderness that Steve was stumbling from, three days with no food or water or hope to sustain him.

He was surprised, when he came across a road, to see what he recognised as a modern hatchback speeding along it. He waved the car down, unsure what to think, and asked the woman who stopped what the date was. She told him, with a strong Scandinavian accent.

It was four days after he’d last visited Tony; he’d been sent back only _a single day_.

The joy and hope that flooded through him is intoxicating, and he grinned as he offered the woman everything she could possibly ever want or need if she could just get him to the airport. On the way, he borrowed her phone.

—

The angel became faintly aware of shouting. When it concentrated hard, the angel realised there were things moving in front of him. Making noises. Saying something, though he had to strain to hear it.

 _How does it work!?_ Echoed faintly through his mind, and it took it several seconds to understand that they were asking it a question. The person - the one with blond hair and blue eyes that the angel was somehow infinitely happy to see - was holding something, holding it out, close to the angels face, eyes closed, face twisted up in some kind of emotion that the angel didn’t recognise but still hated. A strange mixture of hope and desperation. Despair.

The object looked familiar. It even looked important. The angel didn’t understand why.

Time slipped away for a moment, and the next time the Angel was aware of anything the blond was pacing in front of it, casting worried glances its way every few moments. There was another person with black hair leaning very close, looking it directly in the eyes, something glowing deep within them to match the light that bathed the stranger’s hands.

 _He’s not gone yet_ floated through the angel’s head, the sound not matching up with the movement of the stranger’s lips. The angel wondered who they were talking about. _Not… entirely. But it’s close. We need to hurry._

The pacing man had a hand pressed to his mouth, another hugging his stomach, eyes red rimmed and puffy but fiercely determined, and the angel loved them.

It lost time again.

—

Strange paced slowly around the circle, but Steve could only stare at the stone statue sitting perfectly still in the middle, slouched on the chapel’s front steps.

It looks so perfect, every lock of hair perfectly curled in smooth grey stone, but the sick feeling that has been growing low in Steve’s stomach is threatening to overtake him. It was too still. Tony Stark was never this still. It stared through hooded eyes, a look of misery forever frozen on its face, and Steve wants nothing more than to see those features smile again.

They only had a limited amount of time left.

The relic sits at the statue’s feet.

Strange passed behind the statue, his hands glowing, and the relic began to glow in kind. He paced slowly back down the steps, following the arc of the awkwardly drawn circle, and slowed to a stop before it. He stood for a moment, finishing his incantation, as his hands and the relic reached a painful brightness.

The moment the spell is complete, the angel disappears in a cloud of dust, and Steve’s heart crashes through the floor. They had watched the same thing happen to the other victims, bore witness as the spell became complete and the statues shattered into nothing.

But then Tony explodes back into life from within the cloud, an instantaneous eruption of movement and energy and soft, human skin.

Steve does’t even register moving; he just launches himself into the circle, ignoring the annoyed squawk from Strange and the excited yell from Clint, and sweeps Tony up into a hug that could have cracked stone if he hadn’t held back a little. It’s a huge relief to feel that movement, the half-hearted struggling in his arms that quickly turns into laughter and a pat on Steve’s shoulders. The team is there, crashing together in a what Clint would later call “A group hug to end all group hugs”, and Steve’s cheek is nestled firmly in Tony’s soft, human curls.

“I love you,” Steve says, eyes marvelling at how Tony is _moving_ again, right in front of him. He presses a kiss to Tony’s forehead and grins when he feels Tony wriggle and laugh against him. He feels a desperate need to make Tony understand, so he mutters “I love you” again, and shakes his shoulders, concentrating on the miraculous puff of breathe he can feel against his neck.

“Of course you do,” Tony replies. “I’m _awesom_ -”

Steve doesn’t let him finish; he crashes their lips together, a disaster of lips and teeth and twin grins pressed against each other, and as laughter bubbles up his throat to join his team’s all he can think is that the kiss is utterly _perfect._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote the first bit without ever planning on continuing it, hence the plot holes several miles wide. 
> 
> The biggest one, of course, was the fix-it part. Originally it was just going to be a thing where Tony sends Steve back into the past, his transformation is complete, the end. But I did some research and tried to plan it out, and it turns out Weeping Angels are actually capable of sending people both through time and space. 
> 
> There’s at least one example where someone was transported through space alone. 
> 
> So that’s what Tony did. He sapped a little time - a day or so, which the Dr Who wiki told me is enough to bring an Angel back to health for a while - but ultimately Steve was simply transported directly to the thing, the place, that Tony was thinking of. 
> 
> … So yeah, I’m hoping that isn’t as dumb a fix-it as it could have been. :D

**Author's Note:**

> This is a thing I wrote while I was meant to be writing an essay. Whether I end up continuing it depends ENTIRELY on how many essays I have to write in the near future. :D


End file.
